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Hungary prime minister to migrants, ‘Please don’t come!’

Hungary’s anti-immigration prime minister confirms plan to send up to 3,500 troops to Hungary’s southern border with Serbia, to stop migrants from entering the country.

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Several hundred migrants storm into Budapest's main international train station after police re-opened it following a two-day standoff.

By The Washington Post and The Associated Press

Thu., Sept. 3, 2015

BUDAPEST, HUNGARY—In a dramatic sign that Europe’s fast-mounting refugee crisis may be set to get even worse, Hungary’s far-right leader told asylum-seekers Thursday to stay away from Europe and vowed to crack down on the thousands of migrants who are crossing into his country every day.

Prime Minister Viktor Orban railed Thursday at Germany and EU leaders for lacking urgency in dealing with Europe’s migrant crisis as chaos reigned back home, where migrants by the thousands surged into Budapest’s main train station after police ended their two-day blockade of its entrance.

In a swirl of confusion, excited migrants piled into a newly arrived train at Keleti in the Hungarian capital despite announcements in Hungarian and English that all services from the station to Western Europe had been cancelled. A statement on the main departures board said no more trains to Austria or Germany would depart, “due to safety reasons until further notice!”

Many migrants, who couldn’t understand either language and were receiving no advice from Hungarian officials, piled aboard in a standing-room-only crush and hoped for the best. Instead, the train soon stopped northwest of Budapest in the town of Bicske, where dozens of riot police stood waiting to escort the human cargo to one of the country’s major camps for asylum seekers — an overcrowded, open-door facility that many of the migrants already had left days before.

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Disappointed migrants started chanting “No camp!” in Arabic, some tried to flee on foot down the tracks, and one family sat down beside the tracks and appealed to journalists for help. When police told the media to move off the tracks and the family to move inside, the husband in apparent desperation lost emotional control. He threw his own wife and infant child onto the tracks, sat down beside them and started hitting himself in the head as he bemoaned Hungary’s unwillingness to let them travel west.

In a swirl of confusion, migrants piled into trains at the Keleti station in the Hungarian capital despite announcements that there was no service to Western Europe. (LASZLO BALOGH / REUTERS)

The migrant “problem is not a European problem, the problem is a German problem, nobody would like to stay in Hungary,” Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban said. “All of them would like to go to Germany.”
(ERIC VIDAL / REUTERS)

When police told the media to move away, the husband started shouting, “We won’t move from here!”

Police in helmets and body armour surrounded the prone family and lifted the man off of his wife and child. Officers handcuffed him as he whimpered, his chest down on the pavement, and carried him away. The woman and infant were escorted off the tracks but not detained.

Other migrants scuffled with police and forced their way back on to the train’s carriages, where an hours-long standoff in the sweltering sun began. Police delivered water to the migrants, but many tossed the bottles back, expressing fears that police might have drugged the water and wanted to sedate them.

“We don’t need food and water. Just let us go to Germany!” one migrant said from an open train window.

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Hungary’s leaders have taken the hardest stance against the refugees, constructing a 17-kilometre razor-wire fence along their border and warning that Europe’s Christian future is at stake.

The question of how to defuse the human gridlock in Hungary was being hotly debated Thursday in Brussels at a meeting between European Union leaders and Hungary, which for months had done little to prevent asylum applicants from heading west, now says it won’t let more migrants deeper into Europe.

“We Hungarians are full of fear. People in Europe are full of fear, because we see that European leaders, among them the prime ministers, are not capable of controlling the situation,” Orban said.

Orban principally blamed Germany as he confirmed his government’s plan to send at least 3,000 troops to Hungary’s southern border with Serbia, where police patrols, razor-wire coils and a 13-foot (4-meter) fence already seek to deter new arrivals. Orban’s top aide, Janos Lazar, said 160,000 migrants had reached Hungary this year, nearly 90,000 of them since July 6.

Orban said Hungary’s problem with migrants was really “a German problem. Nobody would like to stay in Hungary. All of them would like to go to Germany.”

Where migrants are gathering in Europe

“If we would create an image . . . just come because we are ready to accept everybody, that would be a moral failure, because that is not the case,” Orban said after a meeting with European Parliament President Martin Schulz. “The moral human thing is to make clear, please don’t come. Why do you have to go from Turkey to Europe? Turkey is a safe country. Stay there. It’s risky to come.”

He vowed that Hungary would defend its borders by fingerprinting, photographing and screening all migrants that cross into its territory. Once the proposed measures are passed in parliament, he said, migrants and smugglers alike would be warned of what was to come.

Serbia’s prime minister, Aleksandar Vucic, warned that if Hungary stopped accepting migrants who currently can walk through police-supervised gaps in the razor-wire defences, this could create a dangerous public backlash or humanitarian crisis in Serbia, where many hundreds assemble daily before crossing to Hungary. Virtually none of the migrants claim asylum in non-EU member Serbia.

Vucic said the EU needed a region-wide plan to ensure migrants received care and support if Hungary sealed its border, “otherwise . . . in 12 days, we can face huge problems here.”

Lazar urged Germany to help ease the situation at Budapest’s Keleti train station, where an estimated 3,000 people have camped for days. Conditions have grown increasingly squalid despite the efforts of volunteers distributing water, food, medicine and disinfectants.

On Thursday, an AP reporter saw one infant boy beside his sleeping parents crawling onto the pavement to eat breadcrumbs from the floor. Nearby, an unattended toddler walked to a pile of garbage, picking at discarded wrappers in search of candy.

“We would like Germany, where the migrants want to go, to pull its own weight,” Lazar said, suggesting the migrants go to the German Embassy in Budapest and apply for a German entry visa.

“We believe this is primarily an immigration crisis, not a refugee crisis, and in this situation Europe can’t renounce defending its borders,” Lazar told reporters in Parliament.

German Chancellor Angela Markel declined to respond directly to Hungary’s criticisms, but emphasized that all EU members should show the same care toward war refugees and observe the same obligations on handling asylum cases. She called for each EU nation to accept “a binding quota” of refugee applicants.

When asked by a reporter whether Hungary’s migrant problems were really Germany’s as Orban asserted, Merkel said: “Hungary is right when it says that we must protect our external border and we must register refugees and asylum-seekers. That is undisputed . . . but, of course, that’s not the end of it.

“There is also an obligation to give protection to those who deserve protection. The Geneva convention on refugees applies not just in Germany but in every European member state,” Merkel said during a visit to Bern, Switzerland. “The Geneva convention obliges us to take in refugees from civil wars when they are fleeing from fear, war and horror and give them protection. Germany is doing no more and no less than this . . . and all countries must do this.”

On Wednesday, migrants had threatened to walk the 170 kilometres to the Austrian border from Budapest if police wouldn’t let them board trains to their desired destinations in Austria and Germany.

What we know so far:

Bodies of two children are among 12 migrants, including their mother, to wash up on a beach in Turkey on Sept. 2, putting a devastating human face on the Syrian refugee crisis.

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